Media Portrayals
Members of the fathers' rights movement criticized a 2005 New York Times Sunday Magazine article that began with the words, “…custody determinations are traditionally based on what’s in ‘the child’s best interest.’ But some fathers are now arguing – and agitating – for rights and interests of their own,” for creating a false dichotomy between children's best interests and fathers' rights.
About a Public Broadcasting Services (PBS) documentary about children and divorce, stating members commented that unlike a previous PBS documentary, the show was balanced, but portrayed the movement as promoting conflict, adding that the average viewer did not distinguish conflict in the public sphere from conflict in the home, which could hurt children.
Members also protested a Boston Globe article about a case in which a father successfully prevented a mother from moving children 70 miles away to another state. According to the campaigners, the article inappropriately linked the mixed feelings of the children to their inability to relocate with their mother and to the shared parenting arrangement rather than to divorce, adding that the reporter questioned the children about their living situation and thus exacerbated the conflicts felt by the children.
Read more about this topic: Fathers' Rights Movement In The USA
Famous quotes containing the words media and/or portrayals:
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)
“We attempt to remember our collective American childhood, the way it was, but what we often remember is a combination of real past, pieces reshaped by bitterness and love, and, of course, the video past—the portrayals of family life on such television programs as “Leave it to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best” and all the rest.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)